Democrats play disgusting Race ‘Fear’ Card to get voter turnout

By Nia-Malika Henderson,

Making appeals based on race is not new in politics. It can be subtle, like the posters of President Obama sitting in a barber’s chair that hung in black barbershops in 2008. Or it can be overt and bordering on offensive, like the lynching images left on the car windows of black churchgoers in North Carolina. (For their part, conservatives in the state are running ads that ask this question: “Does Kay Hagan care that 1 out of 3 babies aborted in America are black?”)

As the push to get black voters to the polls comes down to the wire in the midterms, Democrats and progressive groups are using such images to engage black voters. Ferguson, Trayvon Martin and kids in bulletproof vests have all shown up in fliers, radio ads and Web videos. The goal behind the appeals — whether subtle or overt — is the same: to spark some sort of emotional connection, either positive or negative, in a voter.

So, how is it that the appeals to black voters have gone from pictures of a smiling Obama in barber’s smock in 2008 to images of black kids and police brutality in 2014?

In a New York Times article about the tactics, former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, who is black, said:

They have been playing on this nerve in the black community that if you even so much as look at a Republican, churches will start to burn, your civil rights will be taken away and young black men like Trayvon Martin will die. The reality of it is, the Democrats realize that their most loyal constituency is not as loyal as they once were.

Steele’s suggestions aside, there’s little proof that African Americans, two years after voting in record numbers for Democrats, have had a change of heart and are poised to vote Republican.

There has been a more notable shift in how African Americans feel about race, however. And the shift means that it’s now easier to “play on the nerves” of black voters. Consider this snapshot on race relations over the past seven years, and particularly the changes between 2009 and 2014:

There is clearly an Obama bounce in these numbers. In 2009, the year he was inaugurated, African Americans were especially high on their relationships with whites. Five years later, that’s changed markedly.

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